The Empress Lover

by Linda Jaivin

  Back then, Beijing’s young people spoke of art and books and ideas as if they were the most important things on earth. I loved it. I felt the same way (and still do, crazily enough). These, I thought, were my people. No one owned much of anything – everyone was poor and more or less to the same extent as everyone else. My salary at the Foreign Languages Press, a risible $20 a month or so, made me richer than any of my Chinese friends, but not in a way that put me in another class altogether. As Jingjing put it, ‘We’re the poor peasants and you are what’s called a “middle” peasant. You’re still closer to us than the landlords of Jianguomenwai.’ Jianguomenwai was where most of the diplomats and press corps lived on expatriate salaries with ‘hardship post’ benefits in spacious government-managed apartments that had hot running water every day of the week.

  My Shanghai-made, Phoenix-brand bicycle, a shiny blue, was about as good as it got. It wasn’t as though people didn’t crave a better life, but the consumer society and the unabashed, one-eyed materialism that was later to take hold was a long way off. Only the most privileged families and those of us who lived in places like the Friendship Hotel had access to private telephones; most people shared neighbourhood phones manned by a nosy and shuffling member of the Neighbourhood Committee who’d announce incomings to the world at large through a megaphone and then settle in to listen to everything you said. So most of the time, people didn’t bother calling. They either wrote a letter to say they’d be dropping by and posted it a day or two ahead of time or simply popped in. Most workplaces (called danwei: ‘work units’) were devoted to clock-watching and endless meetings, productiveness was optional and the employees often focused on the knitting of scarves and jumpers. No one was very busy, no one took work home. Everyone took an after-lunch nap, either at their workplace or, if they lived close enough, at home. (Things weren’t so different in Taiwan when I first went there – I once had the excruciating experience of accidentally waking up an entire bank, from guards to tellers, when I arrived at noon to change some money.) The economy, which would later pick up bullet-train speed, in those early years of the Reform Era shuffled along in black cloth slippers with rag soles. That left all the time in the world for living. We’d bicycle through the hutongs and across the wider streets from one friend’s place to the next, sometimes in convoy, making up ways to pass the days.

  That afternoon, we were on our way to a gathering at the ruins of the Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace. Its neglected, overgrown grounds, tumble-down marble columns, grandeur and desolation made the Yuanmingyuan a paradise for poets, strewn with metaphors as much as weeds. Yang Lian, a roguishly attractive young poet, wrote one of my favourite Yuanmingyuan poems, ‘Apologia – to a Ruin’, which the great translator John Minford later put into English:

  In the troubled mist

  Searching for my eyes

  Here in the grey shattered sunlight

  Arches, stone pillars cast shadows

  Cast memories blacker than scorched earth …

  I come to this ruin

  Seeking the only hope that has illumined me

  Faint star out of its time

  Destiny, blind cloud

  Pitiless chiaroscuro of my soul

  No, I have not come to lament death! It is not death

  Has drawn me to this desolate world

  I defy all waste and degradation

  – These swaddling clothes

  Are a sun that will not be contained in the grave …

  The city has grown around the Yuanmingyuan now, swallowed it whole, fenced it in and made it ordinary with a schmick new subway station, licensed vendors and fixed-up footpaths. Back then, it was on the outskirts, about an hour’s bike ride from the centre of town. And so we pedalled on through the ramshackle villages of the urban periphery, over narrow roads where life smelled of chickens and pigs and food frying in peanut oil. Peasants stopped what they were doing to stare as we sailed past, the fluoro-pink and lime-green vests they wore in those days glowing like tropical flowers in the incandescence of the late-afternoon sunlight. Earlier that day Jingjing and I had swum together at the huge Friendship Hotel pool. She’d dared me to jump off the high diving board. I’d always been afraid of heights. I was unable to stop myself from comically spinning my legs the whole way down like Wile E. Coyote going off a cliff, and probably yelping too, but I did it. I hit the water with an uncoordinated bang and somersaulted on under, the broken sunlight leading me back to the surface, spluttering and gasping and laughing with amazement. I did it again, just to show Jingjing I could do it properly, like she did, with air and grace – and bicycled just as hard on the way down the second time, yelling even louder but, in the end, having got a toehold on the bottom, bursting from the surface like an orca.

  I remember feeling suffused with joy that day, certain that there was no place in the world better to be, and full of an inchoate anticipation. Perhaps that is just what I remember in retrospect, for when you are young, life paradoxically seems to be both exactly where you are and also waiting for you around the next corner.

  Cycling past the crumbling old temple near Yuanmingyuan’s West Gate, we arrived at the marble and stone shambles that were all that remained of the rococo piles of the Western Palaces, built for the Qianlong emperor by the Jesuits and destroyed by British and French topps at the end of the Opium Wars, in 1860.

  I was still fiddling with my bicycle lock when a hubbub of girls swallowed up Jingjing. Wiping the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, I saw Q for the first time. He glided up, swinging one leg lazily over the back wheel of his bike and bringing it forward to balance toe to heel with the foot that still rested on the pedal, finally by some miracle slowing to a stop beside me, his intense gaze fixing on me. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with an unruly shock of hair and proud looks. Even under the baggy trousers and faded old ‘Mao suit’ jacket, his body appeared as strong as it was lean. He was, I thought in that instant, the most stunning man I’d ever laid eyes on.

  ‘Nice bicycle,’ he drawled in Beijing-accented Mandarin, his eyes giving my Phoenix the once-over. He gestured self-deprecatingly at his beat-up Forever: ‘the old iron anchor’. His voice, heavily burred, reminded me of sesame paste, somewhere between sweet and savoury, more-ish. He finished admiring my Phoenix and looked at me again. I wondered if he’d seen me seconds earlier wiping my sweat on my T-shirt. I could still feel the perspiration trickling down from my temples, over my top lip and under my arms. As discreetly as I could, I held my shirt out from my sides and lightly flapped it like the hutong ladies with their skirts.

  He appeared to be waiting for me to say something. What I wanted to say was something like, ‘Forever’s not such a shabby brand either,’ but back then, my spoken Chinese hadn’t quite caught up with my comprehension. What I eventually blurted out was: ‘Forever is good.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s true,’ he said, the hint of a smile pushing up one corner of his mouth. ‘But isn’t it a bit early for us to be making such a commitment?’

  I’ve always been highly suggestible. For a long, crazy-foolish moment I saw our conjoined future life pass before my eyes, straight through courtship, marriage, children and old age until death did us part – an unusual fantasy for a girl who’d always declared she didn’t believe in marriage and was quite sure she didn’t want children. In the next moment, I came floating back to earth, mortified and bewildered, and wondering if I’d misunderstood him completely. Was he even flirting? I mumbled something half-witted about phoenixes, and saw his eyes narrow and cool by a degree or two. My Chinese wasn’t up to banter back then. I felt stupid, and had an urge to run. I looked around but couldn’t see Jingjing.

  ‘You have an unusual look. Where are you from?’ He’d homed in on my difference. People always did sooner or later.

  ‘I wish I knew.’ It was a well-practised answer, but the curiosity that lit his eyes told me it was still a good one.

  ‘Wa,’ cried Jingjing, popping up again.
She punched him on the arm before draping a protective arm around my shoulders. ‘Long time no see. Q, leave my friend alone. She’s a very nice girl and very, very innocent and needs to be protected from naughty boys like you.’

  ‘I’m not that innocent,’ I protested, but neither of them were paying any attention to me. They were speaking too quickly in the syrupy Beijing patois for me to follow. I made out the word tongxue, classmate, and worked out they had a connection from university. I felt frustrated, as though the language was a fabulous outfit I owned but still didn’t quite know how to wear. At that moment I wanted more than ever to be Chinese – and to be more than just ethnically Chinese, too. I wanted to share in this history that bound them, not just Jingjing and Q, but all of them here at the Yuanmingyuan, these young people my age, the kid brothers and kid sisters of the Red Guard generation, who, as I saw it, were privileged to have been through hell and survived, to have been among the first Chinese to enter university when competitive exams were reinstituted following the Cultural Revolution. They had history. It was almost as though I envied the turbulence and tragedy in their background as much as I knew many of them would have envied the peace and freedom in mine. I also felt jealous of my beautiful friend, stupidly so, even though I knew that she was mad swooning keen on a raffish artist with a roving eye called Wang Jian. As for Q, I knew nothing except that his cockeyed, cocksure smile took my breath away.

  Like a miracle, the answer to my prayers, Wang Jian coasted in on his bicycle, a few louche mates in tow. Moments later, Jingjing was bounding off in their direction like a hare. Q turned that disconcerting gaze – it interrogated, it undressed, it appraised, it tickled – back on me. He then pronounced a simple, four-character phrase, xiangjian henwan, which, to my eternal mortification, I didn’t understand. Worse, I misunderstood it. I thought he was saying something about it being very late, and I replied confusedly about how the evening had just begun. Just then another Jingjing-like Beijing goddess with a big throaty laugh and a pale floaty dress materialised by Q’s side. With an airy ni hao in my direction, she pulled him away before I could even reply. Ni hao yourself.

  Jingjing beckoned me over to where she, Wang Jian and his mates perched on the old column stones of the Western Palace. One, with acne-scarred cheeks and an opportunistic gaze, shared his warm beer and flirted desultorily with me as a minor poet declaimed from his mount atop the broken marble. I flirted back distractedly, my Chinese somehow springing back to life again. Why couldn’t I have been that clever with Q? As soon as I had a chance, I confided to Jingjing what had happened. She had me repeat what I thought he’d said. ‘Baober,’ she said, ‘sweetie, haven’t you ever heard xiangjian henwan? It’s only one of the most romantic phrases in the language. “I hate that it has taken so long in this life for us to meet.” Oh dear. Just look at you. I wish I could redden like that. It’s so cute. Hey.’ She snapped her fingers in my face. ‘The guy’s a player.’ Even thinking about that now, the embarrassment of that grass-scented night makes my eyes squint and shoulders hunch.

  How long had I been daydreaming? My leg had fallen asleep under me on the ta.

  ‘Leave me alone, Q. Nothing personal. But I have to work.’ I’d read somewhere that talking aloud to yourself was the first sign of madness. The second sign was talking aloud to people who weren’t there. Mad, as we say in Australia, as a cut snake.

  It was lunch time. Smoked tofu from the local supermarket, English mustard, a few leaves of lettuce from which time had stolen their crunch and the last of a seeded loaf from the French bakery at Donghu. The pantry was, if not bare, down to its undies. I took a cup of hot water back to my perch.

  Nine hours to my appointment with the dead man. The apparently not-dead man.

  Reviewing Duan Mou’s script, a two-character phrase I wasn’t sure about jumped into view. I was certain I’d learned it once, but couldn’t dredge up either its meaning or pronunciation. I scanned the pile of dictionaries I kept on the ta. Half hidden under a pillow was one I hadn’t used for some time, an old favourite from my Taiwan days. Its print was tiny and the characters old-form, not simplified like the ones used on the mainland, so for all my sentimental attachment to it, I consulted it less and less over the years. In the meantime, its cloth binding had frayed and the spine had split down the middle and on both ends, exposing cotton-blossom cardboard and string. Sticky tape kept an awkward hold on the back cover, itself imprinted – like the Hermit of Peking – with a coffee stain, this one in the shape of a crescent moon.

  The old dictionary fell open at the index of radicals, almost always the first stop in what can be a three-step process for looking up an unfamiliar character. Time had nibbled scallops in the bottom of the page. The signature, the fold of pages to which it belonged, thrust obscenely upwards, wanting attention. I raised the dictionary to my nose and imagined that I could smell the sweat that had been wrung from me over the years by Taiwan’s subtropical heat and the effort of study. There was a small brownish spot, a splash of soy sauce or dried blood. Blood, sweat and tears. Or maybe only soy sauce. I smiled to myself as I mechanically traced the first character with my finger to count its strokes. ‘Running’ radical, twelve strokes. Page 1120. , hsieh4 hou4, ‘to meet without prior engagement; to chance to meet’. And there, flattened onto the page above the character, the papery layers of an ancient rose. Bloodless veins still traced its compressed and curling petals. But they had faded to khaki, only blushing here and there with a colour that wouldn’t die. At one time the dictionary had smelled like rose. Now the rose smelled like dictionary.

  Q gave me that rose twenty-five years ago. It was almost a decade after our first meeting at the Yuanmingyuan and on our third anniversary as a couple. We’d quarrelled over his going. He told me to stop worrying, that it annoyed him. He said I sounded like his mother, the Party member, a malie laotai, ‘Marxist– Leninist Old Lady’ as the contemptuous phrase current at the time went.

  Q’s father had been an architect and ally of the famous historical conservationist Liang Sicheng. In 1956, Mao called for ‘a hundred flowers to bloom and a hundred schools of thought to contend’, that is, for people to speak their minds. Q’s father responded by loudly and eloquently protesting what he termed the Communist Party’s ‘war on old Beijing’. One year later, as the Party’s ‘Anti-Rightist’ campaign slashed through the ranks of the nation’s intelligentsia like the Grim Reaper, his father was condemned by those fighting words to a labour camp. Q’s mother divorced him. The Party rewarded her with a promotion to a cushy job in the city administration, an invitation to join the Party and a new Party-approved husband. Q told me she maintained an air of grim righteousness throughout his childhood, even during the three years of famine when there was never enough to eat, right up to the moment when the Red Guards nabbed her as a member of the ‘old guard’ and hauled her out for public trial by the howling masses. When his father returned to Beijing twenty years later, officially exonerated, skeletally thin and still defiant, Q moved in with him to look after him. A month later, his father succumbed to complications related to the hepatitis he’d contracted while in the gulag. His mother, herself ‘rehabilitated’ in the late seventies, still defended the Party and that drove Q crazy. To cut a long story short, saying that I sounded like his mother was not a compliment.

  I burst into tears. This irritated him even more. He walked out. Then he returned, about two hours later, to collect me for dinner, carrying this rose. That in itself was a small miracle. It wasn’t easy to get cut flowers in Beijing then. A bouquet could cost a factory worker a week’s salary. But he’d found it. I didn’t ask where, though later I did wonder. The point is, he gave it to me – and not long after that, he left. As he said he would.

  Exhaling a long breath, I replaced the rose just above . Once it was laid back within its dictionary-casket, I re-buried the book under the cushions.

  Where, I wondered, do people put mementos in e-books? It occurred to me that you could post a photo of a
rose on a Facebook page, where it might remain in full bloom for eternity, long after the Dearly Facebooked had her- or himself turned to parchment and dust.

  Eight hours before my appointment. The film’s dialogue was killing me. I had no idea what to do with it, and the more I studied it, the more superficial and meaningless it seemed.

  Before revealing what I did next, I feel compelled to declare that I’m not a bad person. Good people do bad things sometimes. This bad was surely on the low end of the scale of badness: worse, certainly, than forgetting your best friend’s birthday, but a considerable distance from rape, pillage and murder, tyranny and massacre. On the other hand, I had made a New Year’s resolution not to do this sort of thing again and it was just days into the new year.

  I made another coffee, silently cursing the genius of Thea Welsh. The Australian writer had written the only novel I knew of that centred on the adventures of a movie subtitler: The Story of the Year of 1912 in the Village of Elza Darzins. It told the story of a translator who, faced with a woolly and obscure script, threw away the original and rewrote the dialogue (and with it the story), to excellent effect. In the novel, the film did very well indeed. Did the subtitler come to grief in the end? I honestly can’t recall. I’m not very good at remembering the endings of things. My talent for forgetting means I can watch a thriller a second or even third time and remain on tenterhooks with each screening. In any case, I prefer beginnings. Beginnings, no matter how fraught or silly, always hold out the possibility that things will turn out well. Everyone’s an optimist at the beginning, because in the excitement that marks the start of all things, even pessimists can secretly hope to be confounded.